Infrastructure Deterioration Quotes

I think most people would like that: probably comes in about ninety percent. They see their public works crumbling, services inadequate, they have libraries and schools and bridges and highways that have not been repaired.

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed

North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

Look at what has happened to Miami. It has become a Third World country. You just pick it up and take it and move it someplace. You would never know you're in the United States of America. You would certainly say you're in a Third World country.

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.

You can go to any city in America and see roads and bridges that need to be fixed…. I would not call them unsafe … they are dangerous…. The best highway system in the world is falling apart.

Detroit's financial challenges - the decline of the American auto industry, the impact of the global economic recession, declining population, and an erosion of the municipal tax base - are key to understanding what led this great city to an inability to provide basic city services or to carry out the normal functions of a municipality.

The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

When the Soviet Union broke down, Georgia suffered a huge deal. Pretty much the whole of the 90's was known as 'the black decade... because we had a lot of electricity blackouts.

By failing to keep their end of the bargain, the Bush administration would allow New Jersey projects to deteriorate and make New Jersey highways and bridges less safe.

Venezuela is incredible, but Caracas? Oh God, I hate it. The sidewalks get smaller every time I go back.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

When you travel across America, when you take the trains and drive on its roads, when you visit cities in the middle of the country, the dismal—even rotting—state of American infrastructure is surprising.

We should be ashamed of ourselves. We inherited the best infrastructure on the globe from our grandparents... and we've taken that inheritance and squandered it.

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

Leaking tunnels, congested roads, rusting bridges, and aging railways often mean one thing: lost opportunity from delays and cancellations.

Are we going to fix our infrastructure? It is aging.

The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

Britain today is suffering from galloping obsolescence.

By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days.

We are a debtor nation, our airports are third world, our highways are falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, everything, we're like third world.

Public spending on infrastructure has fallen to its lowest level since 1947. And the U.S., which used to have the finest infrastructure in the world, is now ranked 16th according to the World Economic Forum, behind Iceland, Spain, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates.

The I-95 bridges were built in the early 1960s and are now more than 50 years old. The same vintage as the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minnesota back in 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The antiquated Skagit River Bridge in Washington state that collapsed last May after a truck hit one of the trusses was even older. And it's not just bridges. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 32 percent of the major roads in America are now in poor condition and in need of major repairs.

I don't think people understand the awesomeness of the destruction of this country - its institutions, its infrastructure, its law, its morals.